Dictionary of Literary Biography on William Morris

Much praised in his own lifetime for the "sweetness" of his lyrics, compared to Chaucer as a narrative poet, and seriously considered as a successor to Tennyson in the laureateship, William Morris has subsequently often been disparaged for writing poetry which, in Henry James's words, evokes a world where the reader has "neither to choose, to criticize, nor to believe, but simply to feel, to look, and to listen." Morris's evocation of a sturdy and practical medieval world functions, however, as a criticism of his own time and an expression of hope for radical change to produce a nonbourgeois, non-capitalist world in the future. In addition, his poetry has historical interest within the Pre-Raphaelite movement, for Morris's first book, The Defence of Guenevere, was published a dozen years before Dante Gabriel Rossetti's first volume of verse, Poems (1870). Morris's versification is also of substantial historical interest, for he develops...